Federica, had a very exciting experience of swimming with elephants on the adventurous Namibia & Botswana Southern Circle tour NBa21.

Having just completed this amazing Southern Circle tour, I would love to share my experience with the rest of the world.

On this tour we get to go to one of the wildest places left on Earth, the “Okavango Delta”. We spend 2nights camping on one of the beautiful main islands of this area, surrounded by wild animals, beautiful birds and lovely big shady trees.

One of the activities that we can do while we are chilling at our private and wild campsite is to go and take a refreshing swim in one of the many channels of this magical place. One afternoon we all decided to go and take a swim because the heat was a little excessive. So we took the Mokoros and we went with our polers to an area where there was a natural pool. Once there, everyone just jumped into the water including our friendly polers and started swimming and enjoying the cool waters of the Delta.

After a couple of minutes being there, one of the polers shouted “elephants!” When we looked over to see where they were coming from, we saw two young bulls walking towards our secluded swimming spot. The polers and I had to tell the clients that we needed to get out of their way because probably they wanted to drink from our private pool. So we made way for these thirsty youngsters very slowly, and waited for them to finish drinking.

The two young bulls were drinking and splashing water for a while like if that natural pool was theirs and not ours like we supposed. They took so long that we basically had to sit down and just wait for them. We believed that these bulls were maybe 50m away from us. It was really a nice sighting, and also a special one because we literally got kicked out from what we called ‘our pool’.

The two elephants knew that we were there watching them, but they were as relaxed as we were. So, after a while they decided to move on, and we managed to get our famous pool back!

Everyone was laughing and saying how extraordinary that moment was.